7 Marketing Tips To Create A Demand For Your New Product

Creating a new product is an exciting venture, especially if market and consumer research has revealed a need, but comprehensive solutions aren’t available yet. Customers want solutions for their problems, but they can’t quite identify what they need. This is where you come in.

If you launch a product and market it well, you’ll have an initial “aha!” moment with some of your audience. The rest of the crowd won’t immediately see it because they don’t know your product is the key to solving their problems. That, or they’re just generally indifferent.

It’s tough to break through the crowd’s buying habits as well, since most American consumers repeatedly buy the same 150 items that fill more than 85% of their needs.

To get on your target customer’s radar, trying out some creative marketing techniques could be your best bet. Here are seven great ways to generate buzz and address the audience’s most pressing needs with the product you’ve created.

1. Product Scarcity

Scarcity is often used to bolster sales, but it can also be used to create massive brand lift. It plays on the customer’s fear of missing out. Marketers use limited-time offers like daily deals, limitations on quantities, or one-time only promotions to create a sense of urgency and leverage scarcity.

Promoting “out of stock” items is another effective approach to developing product scarcity, as it shows potential customers that your product was so popular that your inventory is temporarily depleted. This strategy has been leveraged by a number of manufacturers in recent years:

Amazon Fire TVs ran out of stock just a week after launch

Nintendo shorted the production of the Wii game console

Apple delayed shipping by two weeks or more on the iPhone 5 just minutes after it launched

You could shrug it off as a supply and demand issue, but these companies certainly didn’t refuse the heightened media coverage and consumer demand that resulted from supply shortages.

2. Information Scarcity

If you really understand your target audience, then you already know what will get their attention. If you leak just enough information before launch, you can generate tremendous buzz as your audience searches everywhere for more information.

3. Leverage User-Generated Content

Sometimes creating demand for a product is as simple as letting your customers sell the experience for you. There’s no better example than GoPro. The company doesn’t have to put in much effort to market the brand other than leveraging content created by customers actively using their products. Rather than relying on expensive marketing campaigns, GoPro instead lets their customers’ experiences do the talking and selling.

You can take the same approach to user-generated content by promoting your good reviews, highlighting your best customers, and using images and video of real customers using your products across your social channels.

4. Make It Exclusive

People generally want something more when they can’t have it. They demand to know why they can’t have it, what factor excludes them, and how they can possibly get access to it. Exclusivity plays on the scarcity mindset and fears of missing out, except there are plenty of products to go around.

In an article for Forbes, Siimon Reynolds shared a story about a friend’s trip to Paris, where he visited a luxury watch dealer, Patek Philippe. In the store, his friend discovered a single watch in a glass display case with the price tag of $1 million.

“In order to buy this watch you must write to the CEO of Patek Philippe and tell him why you deserve it,” saidReynolds, founder of Photon Group. “Can you believe that? They have the gall to charge a million for a watch and then you have to pass a test to see if you are worthy of it? Amazing.”

That’s enough to make some want that watch, but it also goes a step beyond that specific watch. The exclusivity of that single piece elevates the perceived value of every other watch sold by Patek Philippe.

5. Focus on the Biggest Problem

Once you’ve identified a major issue facing an audience and you know your product is the perfect fit, you can then take the market by storm with a comprehensive content marketing strategy. Find how they’re currently searching for solutions and develop a your strategy based on those searches.

This is something we do for clients at my content marketing agency. We research the audience’s biggest issues, create a ton of useful content, then distribute and promote it extensively across every channel where the audience might be.

To ramp up your strategy, create a high-value offer that is completely free for anyone interested in it. This offer should consist of your best work that gives away information that is both relevant and helpful for your audience. While it might initially seem counterintuitive, educating your audience with high-value content can help you generate a lot of buzz around your brand and featured product.

“Firstly, it creates a sense of trust between your audience and your brand, which means they’re more likely to come back to your content or your website,” writes content marketer Dan Shewan. “Secondly, it reflects well on your brand – so much so that enthusiastic prospects may take things one step further and advocate for your brand on your behalf, becoming the elusive ‘brand ambassadors’ companies are always talking about.”

A key benefit to this approach is that you’ll capture their attention with the value in your free content. Once you pique their interest, you can draw the connection to your solution. Rather than selling and promoting the product and its features, concentrate on selling the experience and solution.

6. Partner with Rockstars

Influencers hold a lot of sway over their followers. Their audience respects them, trusts their ideas and opinions, and are willingly persuaded by their interactions and content. When you’re launching a new product, incorporating influencers into your marketing strategy can really give your product the boost it needs to get off the ground.

Find influencers in your market who are most relevant to your audience and connect with them to promote your upcoming product launch. Lyfe Kitchen went this route by working with influencers in the sports, health, fitness, and fashion worlds, as well as influential moms, to promote their new food products. The influencer promotions helped them expand from 400 to 1,400 stores in a matter of months.

7. Constantly Innovate

The first version of your product might’ve been revolutionary for your industry or market, but don’t stop there. That first launch was just a first strike on the indifference of the market. After launching the original version of your product, immediately switch your focus to improving on it with the help of customer feedback. Figure out how you can make it better and complete it faster, then launch a new version to capture more of your audience.

This is what Amazon did when it launched the first Kindle reading device. Every version since the initial launch has added functionality, more content, and more affordable price points. In addition to innovating products that supercharge demand with each new version, Amazon also sells the lifestyle benefit to its target audience: enjoying the best of your favorite books, shows, movies, and mobile games, no matter where you are.

Have you taken any creative approaches to generating demand for a product before launch? Share your tips with me in the comments below:

Sujan is the co-founder of Web Profits, a growth marketing agency, and a partner in a handful of software companies including Mailshake, Pick.co, Quuu, and Linktexting.com Between his consulting practice and his software companies, Sujan’s goal is to help entrepreneurs and ...